What Was MLK’s Involvement in the Cambridge Race Riots of the 1960’s?

On Martin Luther King Day, Cambridge residents can reflect on the holiday from a unique perspective. We live in a place rich with US history, as our town was an epicenter of the 1960’s civil rights struggles. Demonstrations and violence roiled on Race and Pine streets, drawing nationwide figures, including civil rights leaders from across the country.

What about Martin Luther King? Did King participate in a protest in Cambridge in the 1960’s? Did he give an inspiring speech urging nonviolence as protesters faced National Guard Troops with bayonets?

While MLK and his followers were preparing for their historic march on Washington, in the summer of 1963, Gloria Richardson was on the streets with demonstrators in Cambridge and working alongside U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to negotiate an end to the violence and racial discrimination in our town. The Cambridge native was the leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), which she formed together with Inez Grubb.

A war scene is a more appropriate characterization of the violence than a riot, according to newspaper reports of gunfights between whites and blacks on the street at that time. In an interview with Richardson by Smithsonian Magazine, she said, “…they were shoot-outs. Because at night, cars would come by shooting at our houses….It was more like a war. I mean, there were times when you couldn’t even go out in the street because the shooting back and forth was so bad.”

Richardson reached out to MLK for his support, but he declined, citing more pressing priorities in the Deep South.

While King was delivering his inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the National Guard was stationed in Cambridge under Martial Law. The federal troops would remain there for the next two years.

Gloria Richardson brushing off a National Guardsman during a demonstration in Cambridge, June 1963. Photo: D.C. Public Library

Kennedy and Richardson mediated a settlement, which became known as the “Treaty of Cambridge.” Signed on July 23, 1963, the agreement set up a human rights commission, desegregated public facilities, and expanded public housing.

Prior to the treaty, Cambridge operated under Jim Crow segregation, enforcing the separation of Blacks and Whites in public establishments. Cambridge schools had remained racially segregated long after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional in 1954.

Local white residents and leaders chafed at the radical changes imposed on the town by the federal government and began to reverse them. Racial tensions rose, culminating in violence and destruction that ignited what became known as “The Cambridge Riots” in 1967.

In the lead-up to the riot, civil rights leaders from around the nation came to Cambridge in support of racial justice. H. Rap Brown, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Louis Farrakhan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcom X, among others, joined the cause. The Cambridge protests even garnered celebrity support from movie stars, including Marlin Brando, Charlton Heston, and Burt Lancaster.

At this point, King offered to come to Cambridge to lend his support to the cause, but Richardson rebuffed him, accusing him of seeking celebrity and abandoning Cambridge when they needed him most in 1963. It does seem a bitter rejection of the national leader who could not be everywhere at once.

One can only wonder if the violent history of Cambridge would have turned out differently if the preacher of peace had come to Cambridge.

But King never came to Cambridge, and he was tragically assassinated soon after on April 4, 1968, igniting riots in Washington DC, Chicago, Baltimore, and many other cities around the country. Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months later on June 5, 1968.

The violence that erupted in Cambridge in 1967 culminated in a fire at the Black Pine Street Elementary School, following an incendiary speech by H. Rap Brown. He delivered it to a crowd assembled across the street from the vacant Pine Street School on July 24, 1967, that had been burned by an arsonist. Upon leaving, Brown was grazed in the head by buckshot fired by police and he suffered minor injury. Around 1:00 am that night, the school was set ablaze again.

The all-white Fire Department refused to respond. Some charge them with willful disregard, but there was a legitimate fear for their safety in entering into a violent riot scene. The uncontrolled fire spread for two blocks, destroying the heart of the African American neighborhood.

The site of the fire started at Pine Street Elementary School in Cambridge on June 24, 1967. Photo: Washington Area Spark / D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection.

The Cambridge Empowerment Center, stands on the site where the Pine Street Elementary School once stood. The school and surrounding community were destroyed by fire in the Cambridge Riots of 1967. Photo by R. Douglas Fields

Today, the Cambridge Empowerment Center sits on the spot where the school was destroyed. It is just a short walk from the revitalized restaurants and shops on Race Street.

Enormous change has come to Cambridge since the riots, with African American women elected as mayors, something unthinkable in the 1960’s. But the area around Pine Street remains predominantly Black, blotted by substandard housing, abandoned homes, poverty, high unemployment, and food insecurity. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” King observed hopefully.

Further reading: Baltimore Magazine, the Smithsonian